1. Field of the Invention
Container lid convertible into a spoon
2. Description of the Prior Art
U.S. Pat. No. 3,931,925 discloses a container lid convertible into a spoon. It was designed to replace an inexpensive, flat, thin, wooden spoon that, heretofore, usually individually wrapped in light paper, had been used to scoop out the contents of a container, such as frozen ice cream, soft ice cream, frozen deserts, ices, cottage cheese, etc., and place it in the user's mouth. The containers typically were open-topped and closed by flat paperboard disc lids having tabs to facilitate disengagement with the containers. Inexpensive as the spoons were, they nevertheless represented, en masse, a considerable cost--at the time the application for this patent was filed in 1974, about $2.30 a thousand. Moreover it was the practice to furnish the spoons separately--a nuisance factor--, and it was impossible to match the number of spoons to the number of containers so that it was customary to provide an excess of spoons. The spoons, moreover, were frequently imperfect. They tended to split and break. Also they were rough and, therefore, unpleasant to the tongue and lips of the user.
Although the patented lid/spoon did overcome the problems inherent in flat wooden spoons, it raised fresh problems of its own. The proposed lid, convertible into a spoon, was made of paperboard and included crease/score lines formed for example by steel rule creasing dies. The purpose of the lines was to facilitate folding of the lid, along the lines, into a configuration that rendered the lid useful as a scoop or spoon. The paperboard of the lid, however, was susceptible to penetrating moisture that might emanate, under certain circumstances, from the product in the container, for example when the container was permitted to stand at a temperature above freezing for a time not long enough to allow its contents to defrost, but long enough to release moisture. The paperboard could be treated to render its undersurface water-impermeable, but if there was a skip in the treatment the spoons made from lids would deform at the skip and cause the product to acquire an unreliable reputation. Moreover the formation of the score/crease lines created transverse tensile stresses in the paperboard at the lines, causing the paper fibers to separate and rendering the lid more vulnerable to penetration by moisture--with consequent softening.
There was a further problem with the patented lid/spoon, namely that the manipulations to be performed manually upon the lid to transform it into a spoon, although simple, were beyond the innate skills of many small children numbered among the army of consumers of the sweet products packaged in lid-closed containers. A large proportion of the children could not read or comprehend minimal textual or diagramatic instructions if provided on the lids. Hence, the lids, in the absence of the familiar wooden spoons would represent frustrating obstacles whose purchase would be spurned. This single problem was a major drawback to the adoption of the patented lid/spoon.